Even potholes are tweeting now

So you think your town is inundated with potholes? Just wait till you see the streets of Panama City. The metropolis has experienced a huge amount of growth recently, but with all of its developments, many of the older roadways have been neglected. Potholes are now so bad that it has become a running joke among residents and to remedy the problem, one of the city’s most popular news organisations, Telemetro Reporta, built a solution — an electronic device that sends a message directly to public officials whenever somebody hits a pothole. Check it out:

Viral Video of the Week

Apple has released a ‘History of Sound’ video by depicting the evolution of music and listening devices from 1888 to 2015 in one and a half minutes. The video promotes their new online music streaming service called Apple Music which is set for a June 30 release and shows the quantum leaps on how we’ve listened to our tunes. Some blasts from the past include the gramophone, radio, vinyl, cassettes and of course, iPods and iPhones.

Everybody knows that kids hate applying sunscreen – to teach little ones about the importance of using UV protection in the summer months, Nivea created these boy and girl dolls whose skin would turn red when overexposed to the sun. When covered with Nivea’s sunscreen, the dolls would remain their normal colour – making the sunscreen application process a little more fun for the kiddies (and creating a diversion for parents) while educating them on the importance of UV protection.

App of the Week

HidrateMe is a ‘smart water bottle’ that sends reminders about whether you’ve had enough water throughout the day. Instead of relying on your body or drinking guidelines to top up, the HidrateMe bottle houses a Bluetooth chip that communicates with a free app on your smartphone. The app also takes into account weather conditions, weight and other data to calculate how much water you should be drinking on any given day. When your bottle glows, it’s time to take a sip!

Fiat just gave you a reason to go for that reverse parallel park. To advertise the ease of parking a Fiat 500, a billboard in Frankfurt was retrofitted with the car’s ultrasonic parking-assist sensors. Cars parking in the spot opposite the billboard were guided into position by an eclectic cast of pre-filmed characters, who appeared on the screen to gesture and relay the driver’s distance to the car behind. Could those of us not in the market for a new car have an app version of this please?

Website of the week

Following up on the very popular website that guesses a person’s age, Microsoft has another fun online space to play around with called Twins or Not. The concept is simple – you upload two photos, and the website will process how similar two people look in both shots and assigns a score from 1 to 100. Remarkably, the website only took four hours to create! You just never know if you’re going to find a long lost twin out there in cyberspace…